Amazon is the counterexample everyone reaches for — the growth-prioritizing company that famously refused to turn a profit
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But Amazon, maybe not on day one but certainly early on, had a viable profit formula inside the business.
Key facts
OpenAI’s S-1 reportedly projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 alone
Now the S-1 describes orbital AI compute satellites by 2028
Going public at a $1 trillion valuation is, almost by definition, accepting money that must be impatient for growth
Christensen and his collaborator Michael Raynor developed the “ Good Money/Bad Money ” theory for exactly this scenario
Summary
When Sam Altman was president of Y Combinator, he advised founders: stay close enough to profitability that you could get there before your next funding round if you had to. Their late Harvard colleague Clayton Christensen would have recognized immediately some of the hallmarks of good money thinking: keep costs low, test whether real customers will pay real prices, don’t let your cost structure outrun your revenue model. OpenAI’s S-1 reportedly projects $14 billion in losses for 2026 alone. Profitability is not expected until 2030 at the earliest. The question none of these roadshows will answer is the one that matters: does this company have a viable path to profitability it could activate if it needed to? Christensen and his collaborator Michael Raynor developed the “ Good Money/Bad Money ” theory for exactly this scenario.